“You’re sure we haven’t met.”
“Fairly.”
“Where are you from?”
“Prague.”
“You’re Czech.”
He nodded.
“A Jew?”
He nodded again.
“How long have you been here?”
“One year,” he said, and then, the realization filling him with wonder and chagrin, “one year today.”
“Did you come with your family?”
“Alone,” he said. “I left them there.” Unbidden, there flashed in his mind’s eye the image of his father, or the ghost of his father, striding down the gangplank of the Rotterdam, arms outstretched. Tears stung his eyes, and a ghostly hand seemed to clutch at his throat. Joe coughed once and batted at the smoke from his cigarette, as if it were irritating him. “My father has recently died.”
She shook her head, looking sorrowful and outraged and, he thought, entirely lovely. As his glibness had departed him, so a more earnest nature seemed to feel greater liberty to confess itself in her.
“I’m really sorry for you,” she said. “My heart goes out to them.”
“It’s not so bad,” Joe said. “It will be all right.”
“You know we’re getting into this war,” she declared. She wasn’t blushing now. The brass-voiced party girl of a moment before, telling a story on herself that ended in an oath, seemed to have vanished. “We have to, and we will. Roosevelt will arrange it. He’s working toward it now. We won’t let them win.”
“No,” Joe said, though Rosa’s views were hardly typical of her countrymen, most of whom felt that the events in Europe were an embroilment to be avoided at any price. “I believe …” He found himself, to his mild surprise, unable to finish the sentence. She reached out and took his arm.
“What I’m saying is just, I don’t know. I guess ‘don’t despair,’ ” she said. “I really, really do mean that, Joe.”
At her words, the touch of her hand, her pronouncing of his short blank American name devoid of all freight and family associations, Joe was overcome with a flood of gratitude so powerful that it frightened him, because it seemed to reflect in its grandeur and force just how little hope he really had left. He pulled away.
“Thank you,” he said stiffly.
She let her hand fall, dismayed at having offended him. “I’m sorry,” she said again. She lifted an eyebrow, quizzical, bold, and on the verge, he thought, of recognizing him. Joe averted his eyes, his heart in his throat, thinking that if she were able to recollect him and the circumstances of their first meeting, his chances with her would be ruined. Her eyes got very big, and her throat, her cheeks, her ears were flooded with the bright heart’s blood of humiliation. Joe could see her making an effort not to look away.
Just then a series of sharp metallic sounds cut the air, as if someone had thrust a spanner into the blades of a giant fan. The room fell silent, and everyone stood listening as the harsh chopping sounds ceased and were followed by an oscillating mechanical whine. A woman screamed, her musical horror carrying all the way up from the ballroom on the ground floor. Everyone turned to the door of the library.
“Help!” came a cry from downstairs, a man’s hoarse voice. “He’s drowning!”
SALVADOR DALÍ lay on his back in the middle of the ballroom floor, smacking ineffectually at the helmet of his diving suit with his gloved hands. His wife knelt beside him, working fiercely at a wingnut that kept the helmet bolted to the brass collar of the suit. A vein bulged in her forehead. A heavy lump of black onyx that she wore at the end of a thick gold chain kept clapping against the bell of the diving helmet.
“Il devient bleu,” she observed in a calm panic. Two of the guests ran to Dalí’s side. One of them—it was the composer, Scott—brushed Señora Dalí’s hands away and took hold of the wings of the nut. Longman Harkoo barreled across the room, showing surprising alacrity for one of his girth. He began to slap at the whining air pump with the sole of his sandaled right foot.
“It’s jammed! It’s overloaded! Oh, what’s the matter with this thing!”
“He’s not getting any oxygen!” offered someone.
“Get that helmet off him!” another suggested.
“What the fuck do you think I’m trying to do!” shouted the composer.
“Stop shouting!” cried Harkoo. He pushed Scott out of the way now, grabbed the wingnut in his meaty fingers, and threw all of his bulk and momentum into a single great twist. The nut turned. He grinned. The nut turned again, and the grin faded. The nut turned, and turned, and turned again, never loosening; it had become fused to the bolt.
Joe stood in the doorway beside Rosa, watching, and as the nut turned helplessly in her father’s fingers, she took hold of Joe’s arm with both hands, without seeming to notice that she was doing so, and squeezed. The plea for his help implicit in the gesture thrilled and alarmed him. He reached into his pocket and took out the Victorinox knife that had been a gift from Thomas on his seventeenth birthday.
“What are you doing?” she said, letting go of him.
He didn’t answer. He walked quickly across the room and knelt down beside Gala Dalí, whose armpits smelled oddly of fennel seed. After ascertaining that Salvador Dalí was indeed beginning to turn blue, Joe opened the screwdriver blade of the knife. He jammed it into the slot on the bolt head to hold the bolt steady. Then he worked the nut. Through the wire grid of the face plate, his eyes met Dalí’s, abulge with terror and asphyxia. A stream of muffled Spanish rattled against the far side of the inch-thick glass. As near as Joe could tell—his Spanish was poor—Dalí was calling abjectly for the intercession of the Holy Mother of God. The bolt held. Joe bit down hard on his lip and twisted until his fingers felt that they would split at the tips. There was a snap, and the nut began to protest and grow warm. Then, slowly, it gave. Fourteen seconds later, with a loud Dom Pérignon pop, Joe yanked the helmet off.
Dalí gave great sobbing gasps as they helped him out of his suit. New York, though lucrative, was in many ways a dangerous place for him: in the spring of 1938, he had made all the papers by falling through a display window at Bonwit Teller. A glass of water was brought; he sat up and drained it. The left brachium of his famous mustache had wilted. He asked for a cigarette. Joe gave him one and held a match to it. Dalí inhaled deeply, coughed, picked a flake of tobacco from his lip. Then he nodded to Joe.
“Jeune homme, vous avez sauvé une vie de très grand valeur,” he said.
“Je le sais bien, maître,” said Joe.
He felt a heavy hand on his shoulder. It was Longman Harkoo.
He was beaming, fairly rocking up and down in his sandals at the turn things had taken. The near death of a world-famous painter in a diving accident, in a Greenwich Village drawing room, contributed an unimpeachable Surrealist luster to the party.
“Hot stuff,” he said.
Then the party seemed to close its fingers around Joe, treasuring him in its palm. He was a hero.* People gathered around, tossing handfuls of hyperbolic adjectives and coarse expostulations at his head, holding their pale tin-pan faces up to his as if to catch a splash of his rattling-jackpot moment of glory. Sammy managed to swim or shoulder his way through the people slapping and grabbing at Joe, and gave him a hug. George Deasey brought him a drink that was bright and cold as metal in his mouth. Joe nodded slowly, without speaking, accepting their tributes and acclaim with the sullen, abstracted air of a victorious athlete, breathing deep. It was nothing to him: noise, smoke, jostling, a confusion of perfumes and hair oils, a throb of pain in his right hand. He looked around the room, rising on tiptoe to see over the waxy tops of men’s heads, peering through the dense foliage of the plumes on women’s hats, searching Rosa out. All his self-denial, his Escapist purity of intentions, were forgotten in the flush of triumph and a sense of calm very like that which pervaded him after he had taken a beating. It seemed to him that his fortunes, his life, the entire apparatus of his sense of self were concentra
ted only on the question of what Rosa Saks would think of him now.
“She fairly bounded across the room to him,” as E. J. Kahn would afterward describe it—referring in his item to Rosa (whom he knew slightly) only as “a fetching Village art maiden”—and then, after managing to reach him, she seemed to grow suddenly shy.
“What did he say to you?” she wanted to know. “Dalí.”
“ ‘Thank you,’ ” said Joe.
“That’s all?”
“He called me ‘jeune homme.’ ”
“I thought I heard you speaking French,” she said, hugging herself to still a tremor of unmistakable, almost maternal pride. Joe, seeing his exploit so richly rewarded by the flush in her cheeks and her unwavering regard, stood there scratching at the side of his nose with the thumb of his right hand, embarrassed by the ease of his success, like a fighter who mats his opponent nineteen seconds into the first round.
“I know who you are,” she said, coloring again. “I mean, I … remember you now.”
“I remember you, too,” he said, hoping it did not sound salacious.
“How would you … I’d like you to see my paintings,” she said. “If you want to, I mean. I have a—a studio upstairs.”
Joe hesitated. From the time of his arrival in New York City, he had never permitted himself to speak to a woman for pleasure. It was not an easy thing to do in English, and anyway, he had not come here to flirt with girls. He didn’t have time for it, and furthermore, he did not feel that he was entitled to such pleasures, or to the commitments that they would inevitably entail. He felt—it was not an articulated feeling, but it was powerful and, in its way, a comfort to him—that he could justify his own liberty only to the degree that he employed it to earn the freedom of the family he had left behind. His life in America was a conditional thing, provisional, unencumbered with personal connections beyond his friendship and partnership with Sammy Clay.
“I—”
At this very moment, Joe’s attention was diverted by the sound of someone, somewhere in the drawing room, talking in German. He turned and searched among the faces and the blare of conversation until he found the lips that were moving in time to the elegant Teutonic syllables he was hearing. They were fleshy, sensual lips, in a severe way, downturned at the corners in a somehow intelligent frown, a frown of keen judgment and bitter good sense. The frowner was a trim, fit man in a black turtleneck sweater and corduroy trousers, rather chinless but with a high forehead and a large, dignified German nose. His hair was fine and fair, and his bright black eyes held a puckish gleam that belied the grave frown. There was great enthusiasm in the eyes, pleasure in the subject of his discourse. He was talking, as far as Joe could tell, about the Negro dance team the Nicholas Brothers.
Joe felt the familiar exultation, the epinephrine flame that burned away doubt and confusion and left only a pure, clear, colorless vapor of rage. He took a deep breath and turned his back on the man.*
“I would love to see your work,” he said.
* Two weeks after Kahn’s piece appeared in The New Yorker, giving some particulars of Josef Kavalier and of his family’s plight, Kahn forwarded to Joe a check for twelve dollars, one for ten, and a letter from a Mrs. F. Bernhard of East Ninety-sixth Street, offering to feed him a home-cooked meal of schnitzel and knödelen. It is probable that Joe never took her up on the offer. Records indicate, however, that the checks were cashed.
* It was probably just as well. The man was Max Ernst, not merely an artist whose work Joe admired but a committed anti-fascist, public enemy of the Nazis, and fellow exile.
THE PITCH of the staircase was steep and the treads narrow. There were three stories above the ground floor, and she took him all the way to the top. It got darker and spookier as they climbed. The walls on either side of the stairs were hung with hundreds of framed portraits of her father, carefully fit together like tiles to cover every inch of available space. In each of them, as far as Joe could tell from a hasty inspection, the subject wore the same goofy suppressing-a-fart expression, and if there was any significant difference among them, apart from the fact that some people were evidently more adept at telepathically focusing a lens than others, it was lost on Joe. As they made their way up through the increasing gloom, Joe seemed to steer only according to the light shed by the action of her palm against his wrist, by the low steady flow of voltage through the conducting medium of their sweat. He stumbled like a drunken man and laughed as she hurried him along. He was vaguely aware of the ache in his hand, but he ignored it. As they turned the landing to the top floor, a strand of her hair caught in the corner of his mouth, and for an instant he crunched it between his teeth.
She took him into a small room in the middle of the house, which curved queerly where it backed up against the central tower. In addition to her tiny, girlish white iron bed, a small dresser, and a nightstand, she had crowded in an easel, a photo enlarger, two bookcases, a drawing table, and a thousand and one other items piled atop one another, strewn about, and jammed together with remarkable industry and abandon.
“This is your studio?” Joe said.
A smaller blush this time, at the tips of her ears.
“Also my bedroom,” she said. “But I wasn’t going to ask you to come up to that.”
There was something unmistakably exultant about the mess that Rosa had made. Her bedroom-studio was at once the canvas, journal, museum, and midden of her life. She did not “decorate” it; she infused it. Sometime around four o’clock that morning, for example, half-disentangled from the tulle of a dream, she had reached for the chewed stub of a Ticonderoga she kept by her bed for this purpose. When, just after dawn, she awoke, she found a scrap of loose-leaf paper in her left hand, scrawled with the cryptic legend “lampedusa.” She had run to the unabridged on its lonely lectern in the library, where she learned this was the name of a small island in the Mediterranean Sea, between Malta and Tunisia. Then she had returned to her room, taken a big thumbtack with an enameled red head from an El Producto box she kept on her supremely “cluttered-up” desk, and tacked the scrap of paper to the eastern wall of her room, where it overlapped a photograph, torn from the pages of Life, of Ambassador Joseph Kennedy’s handsome eldest son, tousled and wearing a Choate cardigan. The scrap joined a reproduction of a portrait of Arthur Rimbaud at seventeen, dreaming with chin in palm; the entire text of her only play, a Jarry-influenced one-act called Homunculus Uncle; plates, sliced from art books, of a detail from Bosch that depicted a woman being pursued by an animate celery, of Edvard Munch’s Madonna, of several Picasso “blue” paintings, and of Klee’s Cosmic Flora; Ignatius Donnelly’s map of Atlantis, traced; a grotesquely vibrant full-color photo, also courtesy of Life, of four cheerful strips of bacon; a spavined dead locust, forelegs arrested in an attitude of pleading; as well as some three hundred other scraps of paper bearing the numinous vocabulary of her dreams, a puzzling lexicon that included “grampus,” “ullage,” “parbuckle,” and some entirely fictitious words, such as “luben” and “salactor.” Socks, blouses, skirts, tights, and twisted underpants lay strewn across teetering piles of books and phonograph albums, the floor was thick with paint-soaked rags and chromo-chaotic cardboard palettes, canvases stacked four deep stood against the walls. She had discovered the surrealistic potential of food, about which she had rather pioneeringly complicated emotions, and everywhere lay portraits of broccoli stalks, cabbage heads, tangerines, turnip greens, mushrooms, beets—big, colorful, drunken tableaux that reminded Joe of Robert Delaunay.
When they walked into the room, Rosa went over to the phonograph and switched it on. When the needle hit the groove, the scratches on the disk popped and crackled like a burning log. Then the air was filled with a festive wheeze of violins.
“Schubert,” said Joe, rocking on his heels. “The Trout.”
“The Trout’s my favorite,” Rosa said.
“Me too.”
“Look out.”
Something hit him in the face,
something soft and alive. Joe brushed at his mouth and came away with a small black moth. It had electric-blue transverse bands on its belly. He shuddered.
Rosa said, “Moths.”
“Moths more than one?”
She nodded and pointed to the bed.
Joe noticed now that there were a fair number of moths in the room, most of them small and brown and unremarkable, scattered on the blankets of the narrow bed, flecking the walls, sleeping in the folds of the curtains.
“It’s an annoyance,” she said. “They’re all over the upstairs of the house. Nobody’s really sure why. Sit down.”
He found a moth-free spot on the bed and sat down.
“Apparently there were moths all through the last house, too,” she said. She knelt down before him. “And in the one before that. That was the one where the murder happened. What’s the matter with your finger?”
“It’s sore. From when I was turning the screw.”
“It looks dislocated.”
His right index finger was curled a little to one side, in a queer parenthetical crook.
“Give me your hand. Come on, it’s all right. I was almost a nurse once.”
He gave her his hand, sensing the thin strong rod of obdurate competence that was the armature of her artsy Village style. She turned his hand over and over, probed delicately with the tips of her own fingers at the joints and skin.
“Doesn’t it hurt?”
“Actually,” he said. The pain, now that he attended to it, was fairly sharp.
“I can fix it.”
“You really are a nurse? I thought you worked at Life the magazine.”